3 Terms and Phrases Developers Use That Every Recruiter Should Know

If you’re a recruiter who doesn’t interact with your company’s tech team on a daily basis, you’re not likely to be aware of all the tech vocabulary. And let’s be honest – if you aren’t the one doing the development work, you probably don’t need to be fluent in tech-speak. But when you’re recruiting an open tech role, you should be prepared to know a thing or two about the role itself and how your company’s engineering culture works on a high-level. Here a few of the common terms and phrases developers use that we think recruiters and technical interviewers should be aware of.

Test Driven Development

Test driven development refers to the practice of developing test cases first and working software afterward. This practice allows for the continuous, layered building of software components that are known to pass their basic functional tests. This helps teams add functionality to their code base and have a suite of test cases available that help ensure that all components still work and nothing has been broken.

Why is this important for recruiters to know? Some companies split the roles up, with one developer (or group of developers) focusing on the testing and another group focusing on developing the product itself. If a developer prefers one way or another, it’s important to bring this up in the early stages of recruitment.

Version Control

Version control is a way for developers to record the changes they make to a codebase. Update a line of code? It gets “committed” in the version control system. Git is one type of version control, and GitHub is a popular service for teams to host their Git repositories.

Why is this important for recruiters to know? Cody Reichert, Co-founder at Assertible, says, “Version control is something everyone, from marketers to HR, can adopt, and it's important to know what version control system your developers use -- especially during interviews, this will be a common question from developers.”

Low Level & High Level Programming Languages

A low-level programming language provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. This refers to either machine code or assembly language. A high-level programming language has strong abstraction from the details of the computer.

Why is this important for recruiters to know? Antony Vitillo, an AR/VR Expert, says, “90% of the phrases developers use are just necessary to do our job. The other 10% (such as low level vs. high level programming languages) are necessary to understand the skills of the developer.